


The Other Man in a Suit

by 221squee



Category: Brimstone, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, the Devil as played by John Glover, various demons and angels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2019-01-06 22:07:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12219903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221squee/pseuds/221squee
Summary: And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;By his dead smile, I knew we stood in Hell.-"Strange Meeting", Wilfred OwenJohn Watson had watched his best friend, Sherlock Holmes jump to his death from the roof of St Bart's Hospital, London.  But it turns out that Sherlock's lack of belief in the supernatural was perhaps misplaced.





	1. Darkness in My Paths

**Author's Note:**

> This is sort of a mashup with the TV show Brimstone. I haven't seen Brimstone since it originally aired, and couldn't find it on DVD, so my memory of it is a little hazy and this story will almost certainly depart from canon in places. This story goes AU about two minutes from the end of Series 2 of Sherlock. I do expect to spoil some things from all the series of Sherlock, up through Series 4, so consider yourself warned.   
> This story refers to some deaths which have occurred in living memory, not all of which were murders, and not all of which were solved. If you have a friend or relative whose death made the news, you might not want to read this story.

Sherlock Holmes pitched his mobile phone behind him onto the roof of St Bart's hospital. He had just disconnected from his best friend, John Watson, who had begged him not to jump. But with Moriarty lying dead on the roof, there was only one way for Sherlock to solve this problem and keep his friends safe from Moriarty's gunmen. 

Sherlock pulled his gaze away from John, who was standing on the far side of the street. Sherlock hoped this plan of his worked. He was almost certain to survive. It was the only way out of Moriarty's trap, for him and John and all of them. He looked down at the ground, and tried to move his foot off the ledge. Some absurd mammalian instinct prevented him from stepping off. He could do this. He would do this. Sherlock gathered himself and leapt off the edge of the roof.

The concrete was coming up faster and faster. It only took a few seconds. There was a horrendous impact. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't move. Everything was dark. As the pain began to register, he thought he heard John calling for him.

\- o - o - o -

Sherlock was sitting upright in a chair. Everything around him was dark, but he could see himself. He could move. He could see. He looked around. Next to him, in another chair, was Moriarty. Moriarty turned his head towards Sherlock and grinned at him. Moriarty didn't look like a man who had just blown his brains out. 

Moriarty was still alive, had seen him fall, seen him die, seen him lose. That was intolerable.

But then a man in a medium-gray suit stepped towards them out of the enclosing darkness and became illuminated. Moriarty looked just as he had on the roof of St Bart's, but this man was different from everyone else Sherlock had seen in his life. He appeared to be an adult male of European ancestry, blondish, rather pleasant-looking, but something was very off about him. This other man's hands were exactly the same size as one another and had no calluses and no scars on them. His shoes looked unworn. His tie was centered exactly at his throat. He appeared to have nothing in his pockets. He was clean-shaven, but he was shaved completely symmetrically. Not even Sherlock himself could shave that perfectly. Everyone made mistakes when shaving, depending on whether he was right- or left-handed. Everyone did. It made no sense!

This other man came to a stop a few feet from Sherlock's and Moriarty's chairs. "Please, allow me to introduce myself," he said. Moriarty started to cackle and threw his head back. The man looked at Moriarty with a very slight look of annoyance. The noise stopped entirely. Sherlock looked at Moriarty. Moriarty had no mouth anymore. There was just smooth skin where his lips ought to have been, and yet it was obvious even without the noise that he was still laughing.

The other man stepped closer to Sherlock, ignoring Moriarty. "Sherlock Holmes, how do you do? Have you deduced where you are yet?"

He looked Sherlock up and down and then began to circle his chair. 

"I've made a friendly little workplace bet with my boss. Perhaps you've heard of him? Bossy bastard, thinks the world of himself. Anyway, we made a bet, and I get to pick one of you to send back to Earth for five years to gather up a few stray demons for me. And if you collect them all, you get another chance at life. Which one of you should I pick? It's not much of a risk letting your soul out of my grasp. It was mine when you got here; it will be mine again soon enough. But I think if I send you, I'll get more souls that way. Mr Moriarty is always backing people into corners with nowhere else to turn. The wailing and gnashing of teeth, I like, but the amount of praying he causes is absolutely disgusting. I can hear it from here." 

He waved his hands back and forth as though attempting to disperse an odor. 

"But why don't you go on up there, try to round up my demons for me, and when you fail, you'll come back here, and Mr Moriarty will go up there and try his hand at collecting the demons for the rest of the time remaining in the five-year period.

"I have 113 demons I need returned. And just to make things easier on your fallible little mortal memory, I'll write their names down for you." 

Sherlock had an instant to feel offended before he felt as though all his skin was burning. Smoke twisted out from under his clothes, and there was a nauseating burned meat smell. Sherlock found he was on his hands and knees, gagging.

"Stand up," the man said.

Sherlock hadn't felt he could stand, hadn't intended to stand, but he immediately got to his feet. Sherlock’s mind whirled. What was this? Could he be having some odd little flickers of consciousness as his brain used up the last of its oxygen and slowed to a stop? This whole situation was very unlike the reality he knew.

Sherlock wasn't sure what was happening here, what any of this was, but if he had to choose between letting Moriarty walk the same Earth as John, or Sherlock walking the same Earth as John, Sherlock knew he would do anything in his power to make sure it was himself. He was decided.

The man in the suit spoke again. "You'll have everything that you had on your person when you died, and just to be a sport, I'll let you have your phone, too. You can receive any information you want, but you can't email, text, call, or otherwise interact with anyone you knew when you were alive, or you'll come right back here and your time on Earth will be over. And now, this young lady will show you the way back to Earth. I have one request before you go. Just before you jumped off the roof at St Bart's, you promised to shake hands with Mr Moriarty. I heard you. Go on."

Moriarty stood and stuck his hand out to Sherlock. Moriarty's hand was warm and dry and felt like any other living human’s hand. Moriarty grinned at him in that mouthless way, and looked him right in the eyes. Moriarty winked. Sherlock flinched away, somehow expecting Moriarty to shoot himself in the head again.

A creature came out of the darkness and took Sherlock's hand. The creature had a human shape, but was entirely covered in gray, ratty feathers, which appeared to grow out of its body. Its hand was dry and porous feeling, like clay soil, and the creature had a very firm grip. Sherlock thought he might've actually preferred Moriarty's hand. Reddish clay clotted the feathers of the creature's face. Sherlock couldn't see the creature's eyes. Perhaps that was for the best. Sherlock looked back over his shoulder as the creature dragged him into the darkness. Moriarty had his mouth back, and his grin back, and the other man in a suit was whispering into his ear.


	2. It Binds Me About as the Collar of My Coat

Sherlock was alone again. The feathered creature had let go of his hand. His environment was dark, but it seemed he was standing between two buildings. He looked up and saw that the sky above him was purplish-orange with the familiar reflections of sodium lamps, and he seemed to be in an alley that smelled strongly of urine. He walked toward the alley's exit. There were cars driving by, and people out on the sidewalk who appeared to be living humans. Three women who appeared to be prostitutes stood near the street.

As uncomfortable as the situation was, there could be no benefit in letting others see that. Sherlock looked up at the sky, feeling like he could breathe an entire lungful of air again. Some might have described his feelings as gratitude, or relief. It was so much lighter here than where he had been. The beautiful orange and purple of sodium lamps reflecting off the smoggy night sky above him, and the wonderful smell of layer upon layer of human urine. He took another deep breath or two.

As Sherlock walked out into the street, he took inventory of his pockets. He had his phone, his keys, his money clip, one of Lestrade's ID's, a squash ball, four bump keys, an upper left lateral human incisor, and a 250 millilitre wash bottle of isopropyl alcohol. It was night, clearly. The people whom he passed sounded like Americans, or perhaps Canadians, could have been any accent west of the Mississippi river. It was rather warm out, with an onshore breeze. It seemed to be early in the evening, so given the temperature, probably Southern California. 

Sherlock passed a store that was called “Los Angeles Wigs.” That answered that question.

Sherlock walked. He walked and he thought. Was there any other option but to behave as though what he was experiencing was real? Apparently he needed to reassess his conclusions about the likelihood of an afterlife. But apparently Moriarty was still...where he was. Would Sherlock's phone really still work? He found himself near a promising-looking overpass and crawled down into the space where the foundations of the upper road sat on the built-up mounds underneath. It was unoccupied. Sherlock took out his phone. It did appear to work, even though he was in a different country and hadn't charged the device since the evening before he jumped off the roof of Bart's.

He looked through some of the London news websites. He did find his suicide in a couple of places, but no mention of Moriarty or John. That was somewhat worrying. If Moriarty was dead and not mentioned, it didn't follow that John was still alive. Oh, John, what happened to you? Sherlock curled up with his face away from the traffic on the underpass and looked at the wall. He slept and dreamed of John pummeling him outside Irene Adler's house.

\- o - o - o -

Sherlock flung out his arm as he started to roll. He was awake now, and someone was leaning over him, pushing him around. The man grabbed something out of Sherlock's pocket, and Sherlock grabbed his wrist. The man struck at him with his other hand, looked stunned for a moment, and then twisted his hand free and scuttled out from under the overpass at top speed. Sherlock sat up and checked his pockets. It looked like the thief had his money clip. Sherlock still had his phone and everything else, even the tooth. Well, a couple inactive credit cards and a hundred pounds wouldn't have got him very far in LA. He looked down. Something glinted on the concrete by his hand. He picked it up to look at it. It was a large piece of a broken blade. He felt something jab him as he turned. There were another couple of the things inside of his shirt. He got out from under the overpass to shake out the pieces.

He examined his clothing and found that the collar of his shirt was cut all the way through and the son of a bitch had even cut the collar of his Belstaff greatcoat. He would've expected to be bleeding. How odd. It was dark out, but not too dark to see that the coat had been cut from his shoulder towards his neck, moving proximally rather than moving distally. The man hadn't been leaning over him sawing away at his collar, but was he not cut at all?

It was too dark to track down his money clip tonight. Sherlock moved out to the grassy median next to the overpass. It would probably be unwise to return to the same spot to sleep. He lay down in the high yellow grass and went to sleep.

When Sherlock woke in the morning, he found that his coat and shirt collar were whole again, and his money clip was back in his pocket.

Sherlock undid his shirt to look at the area underneath where his shirt had been cut. It had been cut, he had seen it. Shirts didn't just sew themselves back together at night! Well, while he had his shirt partway off, he might as well look at the tattoos, which clearly were still there. Clearly. Not a figment of his imagination. Well, he was getting some looks from the people driving onto the freeway. He had better move off and start looking for these "demons".

He searched his memory for anything of note that had happened in Los Angeles. There was the girl who had drowned in the water tank on top of the Cecil Hotel, a hotel which had also served as a base of operations for serial killers Richard Ramirez and Johann Unterweger. Sherlock looked up the address and route on his phone and began to walk. 

Los Angeles was certainly a widely-spread town, with rather poor public transportation. The map on his phone had suggested he could take a series of five buses to his destination, over the course of twelve hours, if he so desired. 

After an hour or so of walking, a shop caught his attention. The metal roll-up door was raised, and the shop was open for business. There were all sorts of religious-looking statues in the windows, and a sign mentioning love spells. Sherlock walked in through the propped-open glass door. Inside were rows of white metal shelves with hundreds of candles on them. Many of the candles were plain, but quite a few of them were in tall, narrow glass jars with various human-looking characters on them.

Sherlock picked up a candle in a glass jar to examine it. There was a man in a monk's robes on it. That was as far as he got before he noticed his own fingers were sinking into the surface of the jar, melting through the glass and into the candle.

The candle burst. Sherlock winced and checked his hand for cuts. From another part of the store, he heard a woman mutter in Haitian, "Oh, what now?" and her footsteps came towards him. It didn't look as though the glass had cut him, but parts of the candle had been propelled all over the floor and several of the shelves. It was a very peculiar burst pattern, different from a thrown or dropped object. Maybe he would have time to experiment with small explosives to see about replicating the pattern. Sherlock noticed that the woman, apparently the store's owner, had stopped at the end of the aisle, and was staring at him wide-eyed rather than berating him for breaking her merchandise. Which was fortunate, as he had no American money to pay for the candle. He would have to see what he could do to talk his way out of the situation. Sherlock turned to the woman and said, in the Haitian he had picked up from his time in Miami, "I am terribly sorry, madam."

The woman put her hands over her face for a moment; she looked rather panicked. He thought he looked like a typical human. No one else had made mention of any devil horns or anything. Yes, dozens of people today had passed him by with little note, at least after he had put his shirt back on. Something else must be going on here. The woman's breathing slowed somewhat, but she still didn't take her eyes off him. "Don't worry about that. Please, have some rum." She gestured grandly towards the cash register area.

Now this was even more confusing. She didn't appear to be making a pass at him- he had seen that flicker of the eyes that generally meant the other party had decided he was gay. But, if it got him out of paying for the candle, why not? He put on a smile and said, "Why, thank you," and followed her.

The woman reached for a bottle on a high shelf, one that did not appear to be commercially prepared, and had rather an orangish tint to it. The bottle was dusty and was unlikely to have been prepared with him in mind, as he had only been in Los Angeles two days. She poured him out rather a lot of the drink, and as he lifted it to his face, he considered what might be in it. There was definitely alcohol wafting off it. It seemed that the orange tint was from something hot, a chili pepper of some sort. He took a large swig anyway, and smiled pleasantly before the heat kicked in. He tried his best not to make an unpleasant face. At least it wasn't a ghost pepper or a scotch bonnet. He wished he had had a few cigarettes before this, though.

Sherlock deliberately took another sip. 

"Warming stuff," he said to the proprietor. "So, if you were looking for a demon, where would you go?"

"I wouldn't go looking for a demon."

"What places would you avoid to stay away from demons, then?"

"Well, there is an old tugboat at the number four pier. I always hate going by it. I don't know why. There could be something there, maybe."

She smiled slightly, and reached under the counter to pull out a little black box. "Let me give you these cigars, sir." 

"That's very kind of you." The expensive-looking black box was the size that contained ten cigars.

"Well, better safe than sorry," she said. That didn't seem to follow at all. Who, exactly did she think he was? Someone who wanted protection money? Did Americans who wanted protection money often speak of demons? None had done so when he was in Florida.

After managing to choke down the rest of the pepper rum, and being fed a handful of pistachios for some reason, Sherlock managed to finally get away from the store. It must have been a case of mistaken identity. 

It was still quite early, a little after ten in the morning, so Sherlock set off in the direction of the sea. It was less than an hour's walk until he reached the water. There was a maritime museum, and a statue out front, rather out of the ordinary. Instead of just a sailor standing on the ground, the statue was of a rope ladder, cast in bronze, twisting up into the air. A bronze sailor climbed up it, free from the earth, and another sailor stood at the bottom, holding the ladder, and coincidentally also serving as a support to the rest of the bronze structure.

The ships visible in the water seemed to be converging on an area away from the number four pier where the tugboat in question was said to be moored. Sherlock turned down the coast and stayed as near as he could to the water, although some of the streets forced him away from it and into various dead ends.

Many of the piers weren't exactly swarming with other people, but when Sherlock finally reached what appeared to be the number four pier, it looked entirely deserted.

The tugboat may have been called the Aurora, but the paint was very weatherbeaten. Sherlock walked down the pier one over from it, looking at the side of it that wasn't attached to the dock. The tugboat's hull was black, and there were rusty and oily iridescent brown streaks trailing down the sides of it. The topsides looked to have once been painted white, but all the rust leaking through made it look cream-coloured. It looked deserted. The doors were closed, there was no water or smoke coming out of it. There weren't even any seagulls sitting on it, which was unusual compared to the other boats he had passed on his way there.

Then Sherlock went around to the dock the boat was tied to. He could see from that side that there was no gangway or ladder, and the side of the boat was much further than he could easily step across. Sherlock took a running jump and overshot his mark so far he almost went over the far side of the boat. He bounced off the railing and landed on his feet on the deck with a loud clang. The pitted decks were metal. That certainly would've alerted anyone on the boat. 

Well, he'd already made a huge amount of noise already; no reason not to make more. He picked up a rusty metal bar that lay against the side of the boat, and used it to pry the padlock off of the nearest door to him. It wasn't completely dark inside the tugboat. Light came in through the portholes and through gaps around the doors, and through little spots in the corners of the walls that had rusted completely through. He hooked open the door so it wouldn't easily slam shut behind him, and dropped the broken lock in his pocket.

As he walked through the tugboat's door that he had wrenched open, he felt like there was something standing behind him about to scream. He looked, but nothing was there. He looked again.

The inside of the tugboat was unpleasant. It wasn't a smell or the temperature, but it felt very off. Maybe it was the shape of the place. The floor slanted, and the ceiling slanted, too. And the low, slanting ceiling was made even more impassable by all the pipes and things running along the hallway above his head. He definitely had to hunch over not to knock his head. When he was on the dock, he would have said that the boat was dead still, but he could feel it rock now that he was aboard.

He worked his way along the hallway, step by clanging step. He still heard no one else at all. All the rooms off the hallway were open, and each was empty, unless demons were awfully small things. If that was so, his demon-retrieval instructions had been extremely lacking.

He came to the end of the hallway, and there was a much larger room there. It reached down into the hull of the ship, and there were all sorts of bronze knobs and bars and cylinders sticking out of everything. The boat must have kept fairly dry, because much of the bronze was still shiny and hadn't gone green. It was very oily smelling in this room. He was standing on a grating surrounded by a rail, with a ship's ladder leading down off of it, so he turned to climb down the ladder facing the steps. He looked where he was putting his feet, and when he was almost to the bottom, he looked up level with where he was, to see a man standing behind the steps staring at him.

The man didn't say a word, but all of a sudden, he was replaced by a cloud. The cloud passed through the stairs onto Sherlock. It was horribly hot and wet on his face. It was impeding his breathing, too. The longest he had ever held his breath was three minutes, forty-one seconds, but he didn't think he could last that long with a lungful of steam. How could he fight steam? Well, here went nothing. Sherlock pulled back the rusty metal bar in his hand, and drove it as hard as he could into the side of the boat. It worked. Saltwater started spraying into the room. He punched a couple more holes just to make sure. 

He ducked down into the rushing water, and his face was much cooler. It didn't do much for the lack of air, though. He felt a hand grab at him, so he hit at it with the bar, and it withdrew. He held his breath as long as he could, but he had to come up again. There was still quite a bit of airspace in the tugboat, and the steam flew at him again. He swung the bar through it, but that did nothing. The boat was starting to tilt noticeably, because it was sinking, but still tied to the dock. Sherlock got at least part of a breath, and ducked down into the water again. 

He wondered if he could wait the man out. He held onto a railing to keep under the water, and looked up towards the surface. It was dark under the water pouring in, but he could see the figure of a man fall into the water above him. He stabbed at him with the bar, and managed to hit him right in the eye. The man glowed orange and boiled the water around him. He had not expected this of a demon. The man vanished again, presumably gone to steam. Sherlock waited a little longer, but he couldn't wait forever. He came up for breath again. There was only a little corner of the boat compartment that still had air in it, and the boat was almost entirely on its side. Nothing attacked him while he was breathing, so after taking his breath, he swam back into the hallway he had first come down. It was easy enough to swim out the open door and climb up on the side of the boat that was still above the water. Nothing attacked him, and he jumped up from the side of the boat to make a grab for the dock.

This time he went too far again in jumping, and knocked into the brick warehouse on the dock. He broke some of the brick facing, too, which was odd. He looked a little more closely, and it wasn't facing at all; it was full-sized bricks that had cracked from the impact. Acid rain? How peculiar.

Sherlock squeezed as much of the saltwater as he could out of his coat and jacket, and headed away from the sunken boat. He pondered how the Haitian woman from the shop could've possibly had occasion to walk by the tugboat pier. It really didn't seem to be a busy place, or on the way to or from anywhere. He supposed he would walk back to the shop and see if he could shed some light on the situation.


	3. Have You Eyes of Flesh?

Sherlock was heading back towards the store the Haitian woman owned when he crossed paths with a church, a baroque Spanish building, painted pink and white. People walked out of the church, and the cars in the parking lot lined up to exit the lot in several places. Sherlock entered the church, after the crowd seemed to have exited. It was much darker inside the church than the bright Los Angeles sunlight. As Sherlock's eyes adjusted, he saw that no one was sitting in the seats. There was only a small knot of people standing at the far end of the church. The unamplified voices echoed around in the high-ceilinged church and it was hard to hear what the man was saying, but he thought he caught, "and all his empty promises." 

Sherlock wandered through the church and as he approached the group of people, they all looked up at him. Most of them went back to looking at the man speaking, but one of the younger men kept an eye on him.

After a few more words here and there, the man in white and gold ceremonial garb posed for a picture with a couple of adults and a baby. He told the couple he would meet them at their house, and then he walked briskly over to Sherlock and asked, "Can I help you?" 

"Yes. What can you tell me about demons?"

The man went through several facial expressions in a row: alarm, wariness, concern about time, and finally settled on resolve. "I'll show you to the rectory. They can assist you there." The man put his hand on Sherlock's upper arm, cringed slightly at the wetness of it, and then pulled him along by it anyway, leading him through a smaller, plainer wing of the church--apparently floored in the 1950's, with green linoleum tiles with white streaks--and out a side door. 

As he walked from one door, the warm sunlight fell right into his eyes, blinding him, but in a moment they were at another door, on a smaller building, with less decoration than the church, but painted the same colors. The man rang the doorbell, and in a moment, an asian man with a mustache answered the door. He was wearing black, with a clerical collar. "Hi, Bennie," the man said.

The man in white and gold--Bennie apparently--said, "Father Philip. I have an event to attend, but this gentleman would like to ask about demons."

The man who had answered the door smiled in a very tight-lipped manner, and said, "Why, certainly, Father Bennie." Father Bennie said, "Thank you," and immediately decamped at that.

Father Philip turned to Sherlock and said, with a slightly more genuine look to his face, "Would you like to come talk in my office?"

"Yes."

Father Philip led Sherlock down a hallway and past a rather homey-looking room with several chairs and a sofa in it. There was an elderly Irishman in black trousers reading a newspaper on the sofa.

"So...did you want to talk about some personal demons you have?" the priest asked hopefully, when they were seated in the office.

"No, literal demons. What can you tell me?"

The priest's face fell a little, but he tried to control it. "Well, are you seeing or hearing demons? Sometimes it can seem like you're hearing or seeing very strange things, but it's really just a chemical imbalance."

"I came here to ask about actual demons; not schizophrenia. Don't you people do exorcisms? Thought I saw that on the news." Sherlock waved his hand. Was that the news? Unimportant.

The priest looked a little more distressed. "We don't usually do exorcisms. But if you want to go to St Emydius, they have some psychiatrists who can help you if you're seeing demons. And it's entirely free. They're there on Monday, Wednesday, Friday."

Sherlock scoffed and tapped his fingers on the desk. He looked at the priest silently.

"You're awfully wet, maybe I could drive you to a shelter? I know for a fact they have empty beds at St Emydius."

Sherlock stopped his tapping. "No."

"Do you have any relatives near here I could drive you to?"

"It's 'to whom I could drive you.' And I don't have any relatives. And if you can't tell me anything about demons, I've got better things to do."

Sherlock vaguely heard the priest offering him a bus pass as he stood up and walked back out of the rectory. He crossed back into the church to cut through it to the street. Where had those cracks in the linoleum tile come from? They looked like very heavy footprints. The footprints of someone who walked like him. Exactly like him. He crouched down for a better look. There was a loud crunching sound under his feet. He stood up again and saw that the tiles had split under his feet. Perhaps he should get outside sooner rather than later.

Well, he supposed the best thing to do was to go back to the store where he had melted the candle. But perhaps not touch anything once he was inside.

Sherlock set out again from the front of the church. Maybe he should've taken the priest's offer of a bus pass. Well, too late now. He thought his coat seemed a little lighter, so at least some of the saltwater had evaporated. At least he hadn't swallowed any seawater. What was the last thing he had drunk? The pepper rum? He didn't feel thirsty, and he hadn't passed out recently. If John was here, he could've reminded him when it was teatime. This had to be John's fault somehow. If he had just stayed where he was put, and not come rushing back to St Bart's...Sherlock sighed. Well, if he caught demons at the same rate, it would only be 224 more days until he saw John again. 

Sherlock stopped dead in his tracks. He had reached the religious goods store, and there, standing in front of it, facing him, just a few feet down the sidewalk, was the man he had fought in the tugboat. Demon? Man? One of twins? Clearly not a standard-issue man at any rate.

Sherlock wondered if the sky wasn't getting darker above him. It wasn't near time for sunset, though. The demon started to stalk towards Sherlock, and Sherlock put a foot back to brace himself, and almost fell. He skipped backwards to keep his footing. The sidewalk was all icy underneath him. The demon was still approaching and seemed to have no traction problems. He leapt and tackled Sherlock, whose feet immediately slid out from underneath him. The demon reared back and swiped at Sherlock's face. Sherlock tried to roll, but his wet coat had frozen to the icy sidewalk. Sherlock kicked at the demon, and tried to sit up as hard as he could, until at one heave, the coat tore, and his arms came free.

He leapt up, and tried to keep a low center of balance. He moved much faster without his wet coat weighing him down, but as he moved, he thought he moved faster than he usually did without the coat. He had no time to allot to that, though; he had a demon to fight. 

For a moment they circled each other, then the demon tried to tackle Sherlock again. Sherlock got out of the way this time, and the demon hit the sidewalk. The demon dug his fingers into the icy sidewalk, and pulled up a large, pointy shard of ice. Sherlock came at the demon from the side, and got ahold of his wrists before he could turn the weapon on Sherlock. Sherlock shook the demon's arm as hard as he could, but he couldn't get him to let go of the piece of ice.

They struggled, and Sherlock pushed the demon around so he was walking backwards towards Sherlock's coat. The demon stepped backwards onto the coat, and wobbled, and Sherlock shoved him as hard as he could. The demon stumbled backwards and fell onto his back, but he was up again in a moment. But now Sherlock had a non-skid footing underneath himself, and he knew where to avoid stepping on the coat so as not to turn his ankle on the squash ball in the pocket.

The demon dove back at him with the shard of ice. They grappled, and Sherlock pushed the demon down so that his arm holding the ice was pinned under Sherlock's shoulder. Sherlock ended up with one hand holding the demon's empty hand away from him, and his other hand free. Sherlock reached into the coat pocket. He fished around and pulled out the padlock he had taken off of the tugboat door, throwing it to the side, and then he found what he was looking for, the wash bottle full of alcohol. It wasn't much, only 250 mL, but it would have to serve. 

He rolled so that he could feel the ice blade under his shoulder, and then sprayed the wash bottle back over his shoulder onto the demon's hand. He felt the demon's arm twitch as he lost his grip on the piece of ice, as it melted under the spray of alcohol. And then the bottle of alcohol was out. 

Sherlock rolled to try to get control of the demon's hand that had held the ice, but the demon moved suddenly and got his arm free. Sherlock kept his hold on the demon's wrist, and used his free arm to hit the demon anywhere he could, flailing wildly. They rolled partway off the coat, and Sherlock kept striking. The demon levered himself partway up, but the dropped flat to the ground again and stopped moving. Sherlock started to his knees to get so he could reach the demon's other arm, but at that moment, the demon started steaming. Steam came off of his skin and out of all the corners of his clothes. Or rather, it was smoke. 

Sherlock dropped the demon's wrist as it heated up quickly and burned his hand. He got back to his feet and turned to fight, but it seemed that was unnecessary, as the demon blazed brightly and all the smoke dissipated, leaving nothing behind. The ice all over the ground steamed away in an instant, and the sidewalk was dry again. People walked up and down the sidewalk as though they had noticed nothing. It was a quiet fight, certainly, but not all of them were absorbed in their smartphones. Sherlock tried to figure out what had happened. He knelt down on his coat again, which squelched. It was still soggy. Nothing new was on the sidewalk, except the empty alcohol bottle, and the broken padlock. He supposed that since the tugboat demon had boiled away when hit in the eye, this ice demon must've somehow landed wrong on the padlock. There really should've been instructions on this demon catching lark. He sat down in the middle of his coat. Someone passing by threw down two coins onto the coat in front of him.


	4. Who Drinks Iniquity like Water

Sherlock got himself to his feet. Apparently there was no more evidence of the ice "demon" around, and sitting on the sidewalk all day wouldn't get him back to John. None of the passersby looked at him, but as he picked up his coat, he saw that the Haitian woman had come to the door of the shop and was looking at him. "You'd better come in, I suppose."

She turned around and led him in. "I saw what happened. Did that follow you from the number four pier?" She stopped and turned to look at him. "Were you bathing in the sea? What's that smell?"

"Involuntarily, yes. The boat sank."

"Maybe you're not exactly who I took you for at first." She looked down at his sleeve, where it was torn through the shirt and the jacket, and several of his new tattoos showed.

"Oh, that's all modern faux-antique trash. I don't know why I got it." He looked down at his arm and saw that he appeared to have a blue aura around his arm, actually around every part of his body he could see.

"I don't know what your tattoo is, but I know I just saw an aura around you. Something is uncanny about you, certainly." 

"Yes." He stared at her for a moment. "How did you know about the tugboat? There was nobody on that pier. Why would you ever have occasion to go there?" 

The lady leaned forward across the counter. "Look, I have different places I get my ceremonial goods, and they're not all from a catalog. Some things are better from other sources, and that's all I will say."

Sherlock looked down again and saw that the blue glow had dissipated. He took a breath. "Any other places you've heard about that might have demons?"

"No, no. That was the only thing that came to mind." 

Sherlock looked at her and wondered whether a blue glow would show up on her, but she just looked grayish. After he stared at her for a couple of seconds, she said, "Well, do you want me to rinse off your coat for you? There's a hose out back. I wouldn't know how to dry it, but I could at least get the saltwater out."

He took her up on the offer. Out back in the alley, he set his pocket items on top of an electrical box of some sort. She made him hold up the coat so she could spray it, and the alley floor was disgusting, so he had to be sure not to let the coat sag too low. There was a lot of side spray that got him, too. After it had been rinsed and wrung out several times, he tasted it. It didn't taste salty anymore, so he supposed that was as good as it would get. The lady rolled up the hose. "I'll get you a plastic bag to put your things in."

She came out again and said she still had no idea about where he might find demons, and she'd be closing up soon, so he might as well get on his way. She'd appreciate if he didn't lead any more demons to her store. She also told him the way to the Cecil Hotel. He put the coat on, and stuffed the bag of things in the pocket. They were all things that wouldn't much be bothered by the damp, or were already past help. He set off, and the woman watched him until he was out of the alley.

The Cecil Hotel was a brick building, about 15 stories high, with the name painted on the side in faded white paint wearing off at the edges of the bricks. He recalled the case of the girl who drowned in the water tank on top of the building, and how her body had been floating in the water tank for several weeks while people in the hotel used the water.

He circled the building. There wasn't even a need to talk his way in or catch the door as someone entered or exited. One of the outside doors in back was propped open with tape to keep the lock from closing. He went up one floor and started walking down the hall.

A thin, dirty man in a baseball cap with red eyes came up to him in the hallway. "You're from the-? She's in 116." The man gestured down the hall and then walked off quickly, covering his face to hide his tears. 

Sherlock wasn't sure who the man thought he was, but he inclined his head to the man, and went to see if there was anything of use to him. 

Sherlock walked through the open door of room 116. It was only a bedroom, not even an en suite bathroom, but looked as though it had been occupied for years. A woman lay on the bed, unmoving. She was very thin, and looked as though she had last updated her fashion sense in the mid-90's. She wore a black t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and worn black jeans that looked as though they had once been skin-tight, but now hung off her. Her hair was all ratted up, so that it was hard to tell if her haircut was modern or far out of fashion. She wore black fingerless gloves, and half a dozen necklaces. Sherlock lifted a large cross and looked under it, then dropped it again, worrying he would melt it. He waited a moment and nothing happened, so he poked at it, then set his hand on it. Apparently this wasn't the same type of object as a saint candle or a church floor.

This wasn't a murder, only an overdose. He walked out of the room to see what else he could find.

He wandered through the building, checking the stairwells and hallways, listening at doors, and reviewing what he knew about the place. Richard Ramirez had stayed there--a rapist, murderer, and mutilator of the dead. Called himself The Night Stalker, currently at San Quentin. A member of the jury for his murder trial died, but turned out to have been murdered by her boyfriend.

Then there was Johann Unterweger, the Austrian serial killer who wrote an autobiography which was apparently of such great literary merit that various literary lights agitated for his pardon. Then after he was pardoned, he immediately went back to murdering prostitutes. He visited LA, stayed at the Cecil Hotel, apparently in homage to Ramirez, murdered several more people, and was arrested by the FBI in Miami in 1992.

In 1962, a woman committing suicide at the hotel landed on a pedestrian and killed him, too. That was really just a one-off, though.

It was a pretty big building, but so far didn't seem any worse than a run-of-the-mill cheap hotel where the near-homeless, alcoholics, drug addicts, and the untreated mentally ill lived. Eventually he got up to the roof. 

The building was built in the 1920's, and had four cylindrical water tanks on top. The tanks were riveted together, and perhaps original to the building. The tanks were painted gray to cover graffiti, which cast doubt on the hotel's claim that no one could get up to the roof. There wasn't much to see besides the tanks, and there were two ladders sitting out on the roof. It would certainly be easy enough to take a look in the tanks.

Sherlock set the ladder up against the tank furthest from the edge of the building, and perhaps more difficult to see from the street. He looked all around the edge of the tank and all over the top. The lid and tank had a hasp that would fit a padlock, but there was no padlock there. There were no marks of use to him that hadn't weathered away by now. Sherlock lifted up the edge of the lid to look inside.

It happened so fast. Something came at his face, and grabbed him, and he smashed his shoulder against the edge of the tank, and then he was in the dark, underwater. The water went up his nose as he tried to breathe, and he could feel it filling his sinuses. He started choking, and flailed around as he tried to get loose from whatever had him. 

Sherlock bounced off the inside walls of the tank as he flung his arms about. Think, think! He went entirely still to see if that would clear the water and if any light would leak into the tank from the outside. It also might induce the thing to let go of him, thinking he was dead. 

As the bubbles cleared from the water, he thought he saw a glow next to his arm, so he grabbed for it. It was something round and rubbery. He dug his fingers into it, and all of a sudden the thing holding him twisted around violently. So that had hurt it? Sherlock punched the rubbery glowing thing as hard as he could, and his arm ruptured it and sunk in. The thing twisted and shook him, and then the whole tank glowed orange. It looked like he was wrapped in some tentacles, maybe a giant squid. He had only a moment to observe this as the thing heated up, and the steam caused the lid to flip up off the tank and land so it was only partly blocking the light. Sherlock kicked the heated squid off of him, got hold of the edge of the tank, and dragged himself out. He landed down on the ground, missing the ladder, and coughed up all the water that had gone into his lungs. His eyes watered, but he turned to see the steam billowing out of the open water tank. 

He waited until the steam stopped, and then cautiously climbed up the ladder again. There was nothing in the tank except the sediment at the bottom; even the walls of the tank were dry now. He climbed down the ladder. Apparently there had been no point in rinsing out his coat. Just as he was taking off the coat, he felt a pain in his left arm. He pulled the coat off, and twisted his jacket and shirt around so he could see the painful area through the slash. One of the mystic-looking tattoos was smoking and fading. He hadn't noticed that happen at the tugboat or in front of the shop.

It was painful, but it wasn't the most painful thing that had ever happened to him. He looked at it as it burned away. Sherlock squeezed the water out of his coat as well as he could, and then laid the coat out flat on the roof. Los Angeles was very warm for December, and Sherlock pondered what he would do next. He turned to check the height of the sun, and there was the man in the suit, the overly-symmetrical man, standing just a few feet away.

Sherlock turned to face him. "What do you want?" he asked.

"Now, now," the man said, "this is no time to be making enemies. I need your signature."

Sherlock searched his mind palace for any old folk stories he might have heard. "Isn't it a little late for that?"

"Not at all. I happen to know you're at a standstill on finding demons, and I know where you might go to find another one. Isn't that nice of me?" He smiled.

The man walked towards him, and even though he hadn't been holding anything just a minute before, he held out a clipboard to Sherlock.

Sherlock didn't put out his hand. 

"Oh, I'm wounded. Don't believe in taking things from me?"

"Maybe I've joined a faith that doesn't believe in taking gifts from you."

"Oh, really? Which one's that? The Patripassians? The Ophites? The Triclavians? For all you know, I invented every one of those religions right now. Better look into it."

The other man disappeared, and Sherlock looked down to see the clipboard was in his hand.


	5. Where the Slain Are, There Is He

Sherlock woke one morning to find a passport and airplane tickets, in the name of Robert Johnson, in the pocket of his greatcoat. Easy enough to remember, he supposed.

He started out walking towards the airport. He would really have to do something about the having-no-American-cash problem, he thought, as the city bus drove by him.

A man in a blue jersey and a blue baseball cap was hollering something at the cars passing by the bus stop. A woman seated in one of three seats under the bus shelter yelled at the man to "have some respect". As the man turned, Sherlock saw that the jersey said "Dodgers" across the front. A police car passed by and did not stop. 

Another bus pulled up to the stop, and a man wearing black-and-white striped pants and nothing else, who was covered in dirt, rolled off of the bus shelter seats and onto the concrete. Another man seated in the bus stop remained hunched over whatever he had in his hands and was holding a lighter to.

A little ways away in a plaza, a man stood on top of a five-gallon bucket holding a sign in front of his chest. The writing was rather small for a sign, and was printed with permanent marker. The sign claimed that the Dalai Lama and the Pope were the same person, and that same person was the Devil. Seemed unlikely, Sherlock thought, although he had certainly never seen the Dalai Lama or the Pope. People streamed past, unconcerned, to and from the coffee stand.

He looked at the coffee stand for a moment as he walked downwind of it. It had been quite some time since he had had a cup of coffee. If John had been here, he could have told him how long. Well, he wasn't dizzy and hadn't fainted, so he supposed it was alright. He couldn't waste time drinking things if he was going to get back to John before the five years was up. He pulled out his phone and checked the date. 

It was April 6, 2012. He had found a few more demons in the months since he had come up to LA. The one with the metal spines had been especially difficult to defeat.

The tattoos or whatever they were still covered the majority of his body, but all but one on his left arm had burned themselves away, as opposed to the ten remaining on his right arm. He still couldn't roll up his sleeves without looking like the kind of person who would permanently cover himself with a lot of faux antique rubbish. He checked one more time to make sure his shirt cuffs were pulled all the way down.

Eventually he got around all the freeways and got into the airport. Sorely tempting as jumping over the freeway sounded, that would surely draw attention, maybe even make the news somehow, if someone had a dashcam. 

Going through the aiport security was reasonably painless. The flight itself was unremarkable, and he landed at Vancouver only a few minutes late.

Sherlock strolled along the wide white floors of the airport. He had no luggage, so he had nothing to slow him down, or require him to lean over sideways and break his stride. As he got out of the gate area into the main, mall-like part, he strolled up to a currency exchange. The clerk tried to talk him into just taking money out of the ATM rather than spending such a large amount on changing the money, but he found the appropriately cutting remark to goad her into agreeing. The exchange fee was 61 Canadian dollars, and he ended up with $256 Canadian. It wouldn't go far, but it was more useful than pounds, anyway.

Sherlock made his way out of the airport and into the city on public transit. He'd been to Vancouver before, and didn't much care for it the first time. He made his way to the nearest hostel to the train station, which promised to be cheap and not to require a credit card. It also promised bedbugs. 

He checked in, and as he made his way to his room, he looked into a rubbish bin in the hallway and picked a beer can out of it. He took it back to his room to tear it up and make a shiv. He wished he hadn't had to leave his knife behind in LA.

Sherlock woke in the morning just as the sun rose. He set out to see what he could see. He had walked several kilometres when he found himself passing a bakery that declared itself to be Traditional and English and was covered in Union Jacks. He glanced briefly into the window and saw a rather oddly dressed man in the queue. The man looked outfitted for the 1920's, hat and all, but his shirt cuffs and trouser cuffs were the right length and had never been let out. He was only about 35 years old, but he didn't look like a modern person wearing antique clothes; he looked as though they had been his clothes the whole time. He thought he might stick his head in the bakery and see what that was all about.

The bell on the door jingled as he came in and queued up behind the oddly-dressed man. As the man pulled out his wallet to pay for his baked goods, Sherlock looked over his shoulder at the clear panel of his wallet that had his driver's license behind it. Apparently the man was named Peter Christopher Gutteridge, but the clear panel was yellowed and cracked directly over the birthdate. As the man stepped out of the way to deal with his change and receipt, Sherlock said to the woman behind the counter, "I'll have what he's having."

The woman picked him out whatever it was he'd ordered, and the man looked back at Sherlock, startled. "Oh," he said, "you're a Londoner, too?"

Sherlock pasted on a friendly smile. "There's nothing I like more than traditional English baked goods."

"Me too. I really miss them from when I was a kid. Only thing to like about Good Friday. My name's Pete. Pete Gutteridge."

The clerk handed him a small paper bag and he handed her a ten. Sherlock shuffled his change and bag around as charmingly as he could and held out his hand to shake. "George Lestrade."

"You don't meet many Georges these days."

"Well, my parents liked traditional names." They walked out of the bakery together and down the sidewalk. 

"So, what do you do?" Pete asked.

"I'm a private detective."

"Oh, really? I'm with the RCMP. What is it you're interfering in? Divorce case?"

"Oh, no, nothing so boring. Way more evil than that."

"Oh, somebody from the old smoke lose a relative?"

"Yep. Got it in one. You know how it is; somebody's child goes overseas on holiday and they never hear from them again. I was thinking about all those spare feet that washed up."

"Well speaking of loose body parts, we've got some partial faces that were found on the coast. Haven't had a DNA hit on a single one of them, but they're still very fresh. Would you like to come by and take a look?"

"I'd be delighted! What time is good for you?"

"Well, tomorrow morning would be fine; let me give you my number."

Sherlock walked off. That seemed peculiarly easy. Who just invited people to look at dead bodies like that? Other than himself, he supposed. Sherlock walked all the way back to the park outside his hostel and sat on a bench. The cherry trees were all bare sticks. He looked at the paper bag he still had with him, and opened it up. It was a hot cross bun. He really hadn't had one of those in forever, and did miss them from when he was a child. He wondered if it would burn his tongue, with the cross and all. He put it in his mouth. It didn't.

\- 0 - 0 - 0 -

Sherlock came by the Vancouver General Hospital early the next morning. He phoned and Gutteridge met him at the front desk. As they walked back to the morgue, Gutteridge talked about his childhood in Essex. He went on about how delightful it was to talk to someone with a normal accent. 

When they got into the cooler lockers, Gutteridge started telling him how none of the pieces of faces were from the same person. No skull, no teeth, no eyes, eyebrows, or scalp hair. Just the flat part of the left cheek for three different people, and a fourth with attached skin down the side of the jaw and including the skin from the neck. Not even a little bit of ear or nose. Just the corner of the lips.

Each partial face was in its own drawer, even though that didn't seem like a very efficient use of space. The first drawer was a female, somewhere between puberty and about 50 years old, depending on environmental exposure, who had had braces, but had had them removed more than five years ago. So the lower limit on the age should be more towards 20 years old. Not as much information as he would've hoped. He looked in the next drawer.

"This one is a very conscientious woman, worried about death, as much good as it did her. Same age range as the last one, puberty to 50 or so." 

"Bollocks."

Sherlock pointed at the remains. "You can see here, on the inferior aspect of the buccal surface where the toothbrush hits. She brushed her teeth so often, it made a thick spot. And look at the angle, she's right-handed. But you can see here, on the outside of the face where she always missed her sunscreen, and sunlight comes in on a left-hand drive car."

Sherlock picked up the bag from the next drawer, one with some beard hair visible. "Good dental hygiene. Has had a left-handed dentist for at least the last five years."

"How can you even say that?"

"You don't see that wrinkle there? You can't get that any other way but a dentist leaning on you. No wonder so many murders go unsolved."

Gutteridge gave him a look.

The last one was the one with the skin from the neck attached. Clearly male with the beard hairs. This was reasonably interesting, though. This had to be a man who played American football. He had once compared an assortment of sportsmen and bodybuilders by the trapezius, platysma, and sternocleidomastoid muscles. It was almost impossible that it should be the neck of a man who went to a gym just for his appearance, or that it should be a man who had a physical job such as construction.  
Sherlock still hadn't managed to find himself a human with the flesh still on who had plowed a field without the aid of animals, but he was always hopeful.

But getting back to the case at hand, if none of the remains were related by DNA, presumably they weren't one nuclear family. They could have been two couples, though. It would be fairly difficult to subdue four people at the same time, and there was no gunpowder residue on any of the remains, according to Gutteridge. No detectable drugs in their systems, but the remains had been floating in water, and weren't especially large anyway.

 

Sherlock looked at where the current maps went according to the website of Curtis Ebbesmeyer, the famous oceanographer. He would look upstream from that. It had rained recently, being Vancouver, and the remains might well have washed down from a river or creek. Sherlock wanted to get out away from the city to see if he could find anything likely, and Gutteridge even let Sherlock borrow his car, which was far beyond Sherlock's expectations. That was one lonely man. 

Sherlock walked along the beach. The trees came down very close to the shore, and it wasn't a sand beach, but gray gravel and rocks. There were huge, twisted, bleached-out trees that had been washed up at the top of the beach during some previous storm.

Further down the beach, a woman was walking along the beach with a black plastic bag, bending down and picking things up every so often. She wore an off-white knit hat and a blue, puffy coat, 30 years out of date. He supposed he might as well walk in that direction. She might've seen something.

Sherlock looked at the bases of the trees as he walked along. Nothing too interesting seemed to be caught there--plastic shopping bags, bottle caps, cigarette butts mostly.

The woman walked up to him. "Awful, isn't it?" she asked. "People throw their garbage everywhere and don't care what happens." 

Sherlock could see quite a few layers of cotton clothing sticking out of the woman's collar, along with a hemp necklace. Clearly the ecologist type of vegan. He halfway paid attention as she went on.

"Humans weren't meant to eat meat! Why else would we have broad, flat molars?"

The woman was glowing a bright gray with every word she spoke. Apparently the gray aura was caused by thinking something was true rather than by it being true. He himself glowed blue for most of the conversations he had these days, with all the lies he told. 

"It's really bad when the rains start in fall. We used to have salmon in the river, but all the pig farm sewage lagoons overflowed and killed all the fish."

That was actually interesting, despite the woman's best efforts.

"Oh, that's appalling," Sherlock said. "Are there lots of pig farms around here?"

"There's only the one big one. There used to be more, but all the little ones went out of business. There's only Kennedy Brown farms left."

After a short sermon about why he shouldn't use honey, Sherlock managed to get out of her what road he had to take to get up to the pig farm.

\- o - o - o -

 

Sherlock pulled up to a likely-looking set of buildings and left the car outside the fence. Instead of walking up the tire ruts towards the buildings, he went around the side of the property that abutted the creek. He looked at the round gray river rocks as he walked. 

Something knocked into Sherlock and his phone went flying out of his hand as he fell. His arm didn't break on the rocks as he would've expected in usual circumstances, but the fall certainly hurt. He rolled and swung at the person or thing that had tackled him, but it had already jumped to its feet. It was a man in a brown work jacket and pants, and black rubber boots. He was looking at Sherlock with the most dead-eyed stare. Certainly, some people's faces would relax as they prepared to attack, but this was another thing entirely. This was the look of a serial killer sizing him up like he wasn't a human at all. He had seen a few in his day, and this was certainly the man he had come looking for.

The man stood with his feet apart, ready to react, and Sherlock said to him, "So, why would you want to cut off the left side of the face?"

The man considered him for a moment and said, "You've only found a left face? I've cut off a lot more pieces than that. That's a little disappointing, actually."

Sherlock said, "I've got four left cheeks to hand. I was wondering if there was anything particular you like about them?"

The man smiled. "Ah, now I know who you mean! Going to send in the rest of your guys now?"

Sherlock was silent.

The man broke into actual laughter. "Oh, that was dumb, kiddo. All by yourself." He looked Sherlock up and down and then charged him. Sherlock got the folded aluminium shiv out of his pocket and slashed at the man as he went past, but didn't manage to get his eye. 

The man got out of Sherlock's reach and turned. "So maybe only slightly less dumb than I thought?" He chuckled. "What are you, then?"

They circled each other. Sherlock wondered if the man expected him to say something like, 'I'm your worst nightmare.' He wondered if he could get him uphill and off of the rocks onto better ground.

The man had apparently circled as far as he wanted to, as he then turned around and ran. Sherlock chased after him, but he immediately lost sight of him in between all the barns and sheds. There had been a constant background noise of pigs snuffling and squeaking at each other, but as Sherlock ran, he could hear the pigs start screaming, dozens of them at least, all making a high-pitched noise. He didn't know much about pigs, but he thought they sounded terrified.

He came around the corner of an open-walled shed and found the noise had stopped. Instead of a herd of pigs, they were all in pieces, strewn across the pen, with the demon standing in the middle of the pen, covered in blood. His fingers looked much sharper and longer than they should. The demon looked right at him, said "Catch me now," and then spun in a circle. As he spun, pieces of himself flew off at all angles into the pile of pig parts, and burrowed down into the pile.

Sherlock considered that. Presumably the demon hadn't done itself in, although there were certainly human murderers who would have done that sort of thing. The pile seemed still now. The shed wasn't exactly well-lit to start with, and the sun was getting lower. 

Well, he knew chicken coops burned very hot. Maybe pigpens also did. He really should start carrying a lighter. Sherlock opened the nearest closed storage shed and looked inside. There were some half-used rags, and hanging from a set of welding tanks was a flint striker. He sniffed the rags, and they seemed oily enough, so he squeezed the striker a few times, dropping sparks onto the rags. He kept an eye on the pigpen as he sheltered the sparks.

The open side of the shed hadn't been out of his sight, so he supposed the demon was still under there. Sherlock leaned over the fence and set the burning rags into the corner so that they touched the wooden wall of the shed. Then he stood back and waited.

He was starting to grow concerned he was burning down a pig shed to no purpose when parts of the roof started falling down onto the pig parts. It was hard to tell with all the creaking and crackling from the fire, but he thought he heard the pile move. He stood as far back as he could get, but the buildings were fairly close together. A big chunk of meat rolled out of the shed and through the fence. Sherlock took a few steps closer to it. It wasn't a piece that had an eye in it, so he waited.

Another piece rolled out of the pile, and rolled awkwardly and joltingly towards the first piece. He changed his mind. He took his beer can shiv and stabbed each piece a couple of times and then retreated. Three pieces came out of the pile at once in different places and started jolting along. He wasn't quite sure with all the smoke, but it looked like the furthest one was part of a human head. He dashed towards it, and the other pieces started rolling after him, but they didn't move very fast. He plunged the aluminium into what looked like an eye, and the piece of flesh flared up and lit on fire. As he jumped back, he saw that all the other loose, crawling pieces had lit on fire, too. 

Sherlock had only an instant to wonder if he was really done here, when he felt the last tattoo burning off his left arm. He undid his cuff just to check that it wasn't a stray ember, and saw the last trace smoke away. Well, he'd better get lost before someone came to check on the fire.

Sherlock walked back along the creek in the dark, just in case his phone decided to ring as he walked past, but it was no use. The shiny black phone was lying somewhere amongst the shiny black river rocks, and he wouldn't find it in the dark, and he wasn't about to stay until daylight. It would probably come back to him, anyway, like everything else from his pockets. Sherlock went back to the car and drove away from the burning pig farm back towards Vancouver.

\- o - o - o -

Sherlock's plane set down at LAX. He had the same problem as he had before, viz, no cash for the country he was in. He would really have to see about dealing with that at some point. Sherlock started off away from the airport. At least his shoes didn't seem to be anymore worn out than the day that he jumped off the roof of Bart's hospital. He didn't want to think about it too closely.

The "median" as the Americans insisted upon calling it, looked tolerable enough to him. There were some low bushes and spindly trees that were green, interspersed with tall yellowed grass, that would make him difficult to see from the roadway. He got in under the tree and saw some wadded up newspapers, and an assortment of fast food soda cups and crisp bags, but no shopping carts or tents or tarps, so he supposed no one else would have a prior claim. He flattened the grass down and lay down to sleep.

Sherlock awoke, gasping. As his brain shifted from sleep to taking in the situation, he felt that he was all wet, and saw that there was a woman in front of him, holding a white plastic bucket. Her black clothing had gathered enough dirt to turn a brownish color, except for the tops of the shoulders, which had bleached out gray, and her hair stuck up at odd angles. She looked at him, seemed to see the reaction she was looking for, and said, "You were burning with hell fire. I had to put it out." 

The woman sat down and dumped a vegetable bag of several dozen cigarette butts out onto the bare dust of the campsite. She smoothed the vegetable bag down, tore open the ends of the cigarettes, and butt by butt emptied out the little brown shreds of tobacco onto the vegetable bag. When all the cigarette butts had been emptied of their cargo, she took a small turquoise folder out of her breast pocket, and put the half-used tobacco into the rolling papers to assemble cigarettes.

"Can I borrow your lighter?" she asked. "I need to set angels on fire."

"Angel dust?" he asked.

"No, angels themselves. Thought all that water woulda cleaned out your ears."

"I don't have a lighter. I quit."

She took out her lighter, shook it around, and as she lit her cigarette, the firelight reflected off her eyes.


	6. His Thunder Speaks for Him

The homeless woman who had thrown a bucket of water over Sherlock set a bizarre-looking canned beverage in front of him. It was all black, with neon green lightning bolts down the front of it. She seemed very insistent that he take it, and come to think of it, he hadn't had anything to drink in awhile. John would probably want him to drink something at least, if he had known Sherlock still existed. It was warm and fizzed over a little when he popped the top. 

"I'm not doing this because I feel bad about throwing water on you. If I would've felt bad about it, I wouldn't have done it. What's a good cheer?" She held the can in front of her and looked at it for a moment. "Here's to us. Who's like us? Damn few, and they're dead." She raised the can in the air, and took a large swig.

Now that the water had stopped dripping into Sherlock's eyes, he took a better look at the woman, in the unlikely event he had missed something at first glance. She hadn't needed another look. That was at least 120 days of London sunlight for the bleaching at the top of her black sweatshirt's shoulders. Couldn't be less than half that for Los Angeles. There were definitely plenty of hiding spaces around the campsite that more clothes could fit. Say ten suits of clothes, equally worn, would make a year and a half. All of them appeared to be heavy-duty work pants, fit to her, so heavier work, like gardening or landscaping. When a house payment got to be too much, one of the first luxuries to go was the gardener. It had been a financial accident; she seemed much more together so far than some of the people he met out in the wild.

Sherlock saluted her with the can, and had a sip. It was extremely sweet, with an aftertaste he supposed would be more difficult to detect had it been cold.

Sherlock had thought he might look over his usual online demon study materials today, but his phone was dripping wet, and wouldn't turn on even briefly. He sorted through his mind palace, reviewing for anything he might have missed that would lead him to another demon. He must've sat up all night, as he noticed the sun was shining directly into his eyes as it rose.

The water woman was still there. It didn't look as though she had attempted to stab him, either. Definitely one up on other places he'd slept. Sherlock fished through his pockets to see if his phone had come back, and so it had. It was working and didn't appear water damaged. He noticed that Lestrade's ID also looked different now. This ID was now good until the first of January, 2019. Lestrade was much greyer in the picture, and was smiling less. And there was now a red and blue guilloche pattern printed all across the identification, picture included.

He looked at his money clip for a moment and wondered if he could get some cooperation on it. 

"Would you hold this money for me? I can't keep it in my pockets overnight. I'll split it with you 50/50." This was appalling. How did he even talk to people when he wasn't high?

The woman just looked at him. 50/50 was the ideal amount, verified experimentally by Guth et al's ultimatum game.

"I'm not giving you anything for it."

He would beg, then. "You just keep that somewhere, and in exchange for you holding it, when a reasonable amount is gathered up, I'll take it to a currency exchange and trade it in for American money and then give you half."

She eyed him. "I'll come with you when you go."

"That works."

Now that that was arranged, Sherlock set off to quarter the city and see if he could see anything demonic, run into anyone uncanny, that sort of thing.

He had been walking for about six hours and not seen anything especially interesting, no more than the usual percentage of murders and thieves, when he saw a woman that caught his attention.

She had a short face, and was blonde with blue eyes. She tried to walk past him without him noticing, but that just made it more obvious. She would fit the description of John's sister Harriet, whom Sherlock had seen in photos but still never in person. He waited till she relaxed enough that he could tell she thought she was safe; then he turned and followed her.

This was also still LA, which, while not consisting entirely of deserted lots, still had some. There was a restaurant whose entire sidewalk was blocked off. It was painted black, a modernist building with lots of squares and the name in stainless steel sticking out from the building on bars and lit from underneath. It was called "Lumen" with all lower-case letters. The lights were currently off. The sidewalk was entirely blocked without a plywood bypass, and the sign told people to use the other side of the street.

There were planters around the building meant to look like dry-laid stone walls. The planters were filled with some sort of strange black grass or sedge, something like that, but it was still pliable-looking and shiny, so it was still being watered. It was all very monochromatically artistic.  
The woman stopped in the restaurant parking lot, on the side away from the street. The only thing facing it in the next lot was an office building, currently unoccupied. She stood facing away from him, with her arms out from her body, and where he could see them. "Please, let me go."

He checked to make sure he hadn't lost his knife, and that it hadn't cut its way out of his pocket. No one had ever asked that before. How novel. The demons mostly just attacked him, or occasionally claimed not to be demons. A few, tiresomely, insisted on recounting their crimes defiantly, but none had straightforwardly asked to be let go. 

"Why would I do that?" He circled out to see around the corner of the building, and make sure she didn't have an accomplice sneaking up on him.

"I hope to be forgiven." She turned, slowly, and held out her hands, palms out, towards him. "Please, give me time to repent." She was producing actual tears, but that didn't mean a great deal. Sherlock himself could cry on command, and he knew others who could, as well. He had been unswayed by Irene Adler's tears, and he would be unswayed by those of this woman.

He looked her over. Now this, this was a poisoner--the performance of weakness, the downcast eyes. Poisoning wasn't nearly so popular nowadays. This was definitely looking like one of his demons, and not one who had become a demon in living memory.

"You're a poisoner," he said.

"I have poisoned." She looked at him for a long minute. "No, you're not a priest. I have done bad things, but I have stopped doing them. Give me time to find a priest. Then I will come back."

They didn't hang many women in England, but if they were poisoners, the odds were much better.

"I have to kill you."

"Why? What about free will? Are you only a clockwork that runs in its tracks and never turns aside? What good is having a soul if you never use it for free will? Maybe you do have to kill me. Do you have to kill me at this exact moment? Have I attacked you? Watch." 

She spit at the weird black grass, from much further away than most people could. If this didn't tie the cherry pit spitting record of 28.51 metres, it came close. One bunch of grass turned brown and dry and shriveled completely and almost immediately, and the bunches either side of it were partially shriveled.

It was an ostentatious display, the sort meant to discourage a fight, and it could've easily been used suddenly upon Sherlock, and not given him any chance to avoid it. It was elegant, in its way. There was no ostentation for ostentation's sake, only the barest minimum of force necessary to be effective.

He held out his hand and bid her go.

Another month passed. Sherlock figured he probably wouldn't be seeing the poisoner again. Or he would, but it would be significantly more work. He had gathered up L1800 and taken them to the closest currency exchange, which was still the airport. The woman--Reina, Rachel--whatever her name was, had come with him, and had got a few looks, but no one had thrown her out of the airport, so they split up their money under the disapproving eyes of the exchange clerk.

As they walked out of the grounds of the airport, the woman said, "I'm going to rent a room and take a shower. See you when I run out of money." She ambled off down the street, holding a plastic shopping bag.

Sherlock was once again walking up and down the entire length of Wiltshire, hoping to find something of interest, when he saw out of the corner of his eye, someone move into step beside him.

"I found someone to confess to."

The blonde woman marched along beside him as he looked at her, and thought about what he should do. She gestured down a side street, and hopped a fence into the fenced-in yard of a single story house. He somewhat cautiously followed her, but she didn't attack him as he leapt the fence, or do anything else aggressive.   
He stood there next to a swimming pool. He supposed he had better get this over with. What would one say to a penitent demon? Offer a last meal? Cigarette? Blindfold?

"Come, then," she said, and gave a brief smile with a quivering lip. "We all have places to be." 

She stood still as he got his knife out and tried to calculate the best and quickest angle. She blinked uncontrollably as he leaned in towards her, but she never moved her head. 

The act was done.

A dark green flame consumed her from the feet up. No heat radiated off it that he could feel. A bright white flare at the top of where her head had been caused Sherlock to jump back. He was just surprised, not scared, and by the time he could see again, there were only a few green sparks in front of him, drifting upwards.

He hadn't felt any of the marks burn off him, so he checked. They were all still there. The right leg, and the ones on his chest.

Speaking of last meals, when was the last time Sherlock ate? It seemed late. He checked his phone, which said 2:13 am. The only things still open would be near the bars. A Japanese restaurant, with a sign saying "Open 24 Hours" in white letters on a red awning appeared to fit the bill. A disheveled man with a woman tucked under his arm stumbled out of the restaurant into Sherlock's path, looking him up and down. "Why you wearing a coat like that? You got a tail?" The girlfriend snickered, and they staggered away.

Sherlock was shown to his seat by the hostess, and he ordered kitsune udon in Japanese. Only a moment later he saw someone approach the booth. He had thought that was awfully fast, even for noodle soup, but he looked up into the face of the overly symmetrical man in the suit.

The man looked directly at him as he slid into the booth across from Sherlock. He leaned across the aisle to the next table and knocked the soy sauce over onto the cash tip that had been left. 

Sherlock wondered what he was doing there. As the other man leaned back into Sherlock's booth, Sherlock asked, "So, that counts towards the 113, right?"

The other man in the suit looked up towards the sky. After a moment of looking up, he sighed, theatrically, and brought his gaze back upon Sherlock. "It appears the court against which there is no appeal has rendered its verdict. That soul counts towards your 113."

Sherlock had only a moment to feel triumphant before he felt the mark burning off his skin. That definitely was more painful than any of the other marks had been. Some of them he hadn't felt at all. He thought he had heard some saying somewhere about the Prince of Darkness being a gentleman, but this seemed like the sorest loser of sore losers. Sherlock twisted around as his skin burned.

He was immediately asked to leave the restaurant.


	7. Chapter 7

It was June 16th of 2015. Sherlock had been finding fewer and fewer demons per month, and he only had until...2016...sometime? What day had he jumped off of St Bart's? He checked the internet on his phone. June 16th was John's blog entry "He was my best friend and I'll always believe in him." John hadn't written anything else on his blog in four years. It would be the work of a moment to figure out what (no doubt risible) parts of the internet John frequented if Sherlock could only see him in person.

He set his phone down and looked at his arms again. He only had 14 of the sigils on his skin left--13 on his chest, and one on his left arm. He could leave his sleeves rolled up now without looking like the most vapid sort of criminal. It made sense, though, that as more demons were caught, they had a much larger average distance between them and would be harder to find. 

Sherlock turned his head to follow a jogger with clearly uneven leg length, and when he turned back, that man in the suit was sitting on the park bench next to him.

Apparently he found it necessary to lean in very close to Sherlock while he talked, but Sherlock wasn't disturbed by the tactic. Many people had tried to intimidate him by crowding him.

The man in the suit said to him, "I'm glad you could spare me a moment. I wanted to talk to you about buying out the rest of your contract. The price is negotiable, and you wouldn't have to round up those last few, pesky demons." 

Sherlock's thoughts whirled. He must have him 'on the ropes'. The man in the suit must have thought Sherlock had good odds of detaining the rest of the demons, or he thought that having Sherlock would be worth leaving the rest roaming around free. Well, Sherlock, for one, was not letting Moriarty come back to the same Earth John still walked, or letting John walk around unshriven for longer than necessary. He might've agreed unknowingly to such a deal before he died, but now in his 'sure and certain' hope of an afterlife, it needed to be taken into his calculations. 

"But would I get my soul back? Would I be able to see John?"

"What's a soul, really? Have you ever seen one? Have you ever seen any evidence it exists? And I don't see why you couldn't see John. What would be the problem with that?"

What would be the problem with that? There had to be a catch. The other man probably thought Sherlock would drag John down with him. "I've learned to look before I leap. If my soul's so worthless, why not just give it back?"

"You delight in leaping. You should do it."

"I've heard this one before. And the angels will catch me when I fall, since I'm on their side?"

The man in the suit chuckled. "They're all on the same side, are they?" He snapped his fingers. "So close." 

The man in the suit turned his hand, and there was another airline ticket that he pressed upon Sherlock. "If you're going to keep rounding up demons anyway, you might as well get cracking. See you soon." 

Sherlock looked up again and the man in the suit was nowhere to be seen.

Soon enough, Sherlock was back at the airport, with Rosemary...? Anyway, it was about time to exchange his stash of pounds again. There was a new clerk at the currency exchange counter, who gave Sherlock and Rachel or whatever her name was, a very strange look. She smiled anyway, as politely as she could, exchanged the pounds for dollars correctly, and then asked, "Can I help you and your...wife?... with anything else?"

"Oh, no. She's my 'work wife'," Sherlock laughed. This perplexed the clerk greatly, and her face made a rather intriguing transition from laughter to confusion, and then back to polite smiling. With that, Sherlock headed off towards the security line and whats-her-name headed off wherever.

Sherlock found no excess murders in New York above the expected amount of white noise. He hadn't heard of demons wandering the streets, or at least nothing from any source less spurious than the usual sort writing about secret lizard people.

But surely there was something out of the ordinary. He might go and see about the Gilgo Beach killer, even though it was a little way out of town. Son of Sam? Still alive in jail, so presumably not a demon.

It looked like it would be ridiculously expensive to get from the airport by taxi, and most other ways of getting around would require a credit card, so Sherlock took public transportation. It was June, and despite how much further north New York City was than Los Angeles, it was much hotter in New York City.

As Sherlock waited, a few fireflies bounced about the bus shelter. The bus was as buses were, not the worst, not the best. As the bus wended its way towards Manhattan, eventually the Statue of Liberty was visible from some angles. Besides some larger ferryboats, there were also many very small ferryboats. 

After about an hour and a half, the bus pulled up to its terminal, and Sherlock got out, wending his way amongst the pedestrians, who were much slower-walking than those in London. The occasional crowd formed on a sidewalk in Los Angeles, but only right in front of the big tourist destinations. New York had an actual City-sized crowd. Sherlock had thought that it was just the bus terminal that smelled of urine, but on further consideration, the smell extended throughout the city.

Working his way North, Sherlock looked up and saw that above street-level, there was one building that stood out greatly from all the blue glow on it. There were just the typical swirls of blue and the occasional swirl of gray truthfulness amongst the pedestrians around him, but up high, one building stood out for being entirely aglow in blue. It reminded Sherlock of a movie John had once insisted upon watching in his presence. Took place in New York City, dark haired woman in a red dress, demon dog, light going up to the sky-couldn't remember much about it, really, except that John had asked him pointedly if the woman reminded him of anyone. There weren't demon dogs, were there? Ugh, there probably were.

It was a Saturday afternoon. The streets were certainly crowded, but the office buildings were deserted. It was the work of a moment to get around the single security guard on the ground floor of Mackler Securities.

Sherlock considered the problem of demon dogs as he searched through the skyscraper. He was fast and able to stay out of sight of the cameras, and the building was very sparsely populated. He took the first breakroom he came to, and went through the drawers, but there were only spoons and plastic fast food tableware. 

He eventually managed to find a sword letter opener in one of the fancy corner offices. He took a moment to look down through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the ferries and sailboats in the surrounding water. There was even an old-fashioned sailing ship. 

Sherlock finally made his way onto the seventeenth floor, which did have a little more security than all of the floors he had previously examined. It looked somewhat promising.

The man sitting at the receptionist's desk was only a few centimetres shorter than Sherlock, but his office chair was set so that the seat was as low as it could possibly go. No one typing away at that speed could be so technically inept as to be unable to adjust the chair to his own height. Ergo, not really the receptionist.

Sherlock waved through his options. Probably wouldn't pass as a janitor dressed as he was. He decided to stroll straight up. He put on his best New York accent, making sure not to go too nasal.   
"I'm so sorry. I was supposed to meet my girlfriend here, and I thought she was on the seventeenth floor--"  
The man stood up, pushing his chair back, and focusing on Sherlock with the gaze of someone who could see right through you, into your heart. Yep, this looked like the man whose picture was in the lobby. Sherlock kept strolling across the office floor. "So how did you become a 'demon'? Slave trade? Car theft? Crossing against the light?"

The man licked his lips, and some drool came out of the corner of his mouth. That was kind of strange. Or actually, it wasn't drool. A drop beaded up and thunked onto the desk the man had pushed himself back from. Then the surface of the desk began smoking. More and more drops poured out of the man's mouth, hitting the desk, and dripping onto the floor as he backed up and came around the desk towards Sherlock. 

The gold puddled out across the floor. Sherlock leapt up onto the nearest desk. The gold drool kept moving outward from Mackler's mouth. There could not possibly have been that much material inside of a person, but it kept coming and coming. The floor groaned under Mackler. The gold drool was melting the carpet as it came, and giving off horrendous fumes. The fire alarm started, and a couple of seconds later, rusty water started pouring out of the sprinklers on the ceiling. As soon as the water hit the gold, a cloud of steam filled the room. Sherlock ducked down and lay flat on the top of the desk, to try to stay underneath it, but the steam was scalding his skin. He felt the desk shift under him.

He didn't have good numbers for what temperatures eyes would burst open. He should probably run some numbers on that the next opportunity he got.

There was a thunking and squeaking around him as some of the other furniture in the room knocked together. The desk he lay on moved jerkily, and then began sliding across the room. Blinded by the steam, he could only suppose that all four legs were being carried on the gold drool. It was excruciatingly hot. There was a clunk, as the desk hit the floor-to-ceiling window. Sherlock reached into his pocket, pulled out the rinse bottle of alcohol, and threw it back in Mackler's last known direction. He heard a small whuff as it caught fire. 

The window next to him made a chirping noise, as though a crack had run up it. The gold must have been pouring through the bottom edge of the window, down the other outside windows, and down to the street. Although now that one edge of the window was out, maybe he could manage to break the rest of it off. He recalled the case of a Toronto lawyer who had fallen to his death demonstrating to a class of law students that the windows in skyscrapers were made to be unbreakable in any normal circumstances. The man had leapt up against the window and slammed it with his shoulder, and the entire thing had popped off its frame, and gone with him to the street below. And now Sherlock was a little stronger than usual, and significantly more indestructible. 

Sherlock reached out his hand to the window, and felt along until he felt the edge of a pane. He heaved himself up onto his hands and knees under the weight of his sodden, steam-drenched coat, leaned his head as far down as possible, took a deep breath, stood quickly, and rammed his shoulder into the edge of the window. He rammed again. He thought he heard another squeaking crack. He kept one hand on the frame of the window, so as to tell where he was, and keep the blows against the window from pushing his desk out and away from the window again.

Sherlock ducked his head down for another breath. He rammed again. The window flexed a little, and he wobbled on his feet. It all came flooding back to him, that sound of John on the phone crying out to him. He ducked down again to breathe for a moment. Sooner or later, Mackler was going to start moving, or the floor would cave in.  
The sprinklers stopped. Nothing but drips came out of them. The fire alarm was still loud, and the air coming from the gap at the bottom of the window was very cool. The carpet smoke was dissipating quickly. Sherlock wondered if that was a dark outline of Mackler he could see through the carpet smoke. He might never get back to John if he didn't escape now. He could of course, hold out hope that John would commit all sorts of sins in his life, and end up in the same place as Sherlock eventually, but he supposed he shouldn't hope for that.

Sherlock stood again. There was nothing else he wanted more in any world than to see John saved. He rammed the window as hard as he could. The desk slid under him, and the window flexed, and a good third of the window broke off, and fell with him as he rolled out of the building into the air. There wasn't much time to react, but he twisted so his arms and legs were under him as he fell, and then he crushed in the roof of a car, with the piece of glass embedding in the bonnet next to him.

Sherlock looked a passerby right in the face for a moment, as he crouched, halfway through the car. He pulled on one arm, which was apparently driven through the roof and into the back seat of the car. He shook his hand, and worked it out from between the seat springs. He looked up again towards the window he had just fallen from. There was still gold pouring from the broken window, spreading across the side of the building, and falling to the sidewalk in blobby chunks, like lava. Then he saw a head stick out, and duck back in. Sherlock moved faster, bracing his now-free arm across the top of the car roof, and pulling his other arm out of its car seat and roof. Oh, Lord, someone was filming him. Maybe the other man in a suit would interfere with the recording?

Sherlock had both hands free. How long would it take Mackler to get down to the ground floor? Would he take the elevator? Would he jump? Would he be concerned about getting the gold drool cleaned up and appearing normal to others? Surely even he couldn't manage to threaten or trick all those other people into silence.  
Sherlock was having a great deal of difficulting extricating his legs from the car. It seemed that one foot had gone into the floor of the car, and the other was sticking out touching the pavement, as he felt around with it. That might be helpful. He pushed with his toe against the asphalt as the car groaned. He got that foot up into the car, pushed up, pushed up again. His knee now free, he twisted his hips so that his leg bent at the knee, his other leg turned in its hole, and he grabbed the hand holes he had made, and tried to draw his knee up to his chest, so he could get his foot out of the roof.

He looked back to the main entrance of the office building. Now there were four people filming him, and another two filming the gold drool pouring out of the broken window. His foot was free. Shoeless, but free. Sherlock tilted himself backwards over his remaining trapped leg, but that only flexed the roof of the car, and made more shards of glass pop out of the windshield. 

He stopped to gather himself for a moment. He leaned so that his hands and his free lower leg surrounded the last leg. He succeeded inch by inch in drawing the leg up. If he could just get his free ankle room to bend. Yes! He got one foot under him, extending his leg, and at last stood free on top of the car. He leapt down and started running. It was not the most unobtrusive getaway he had ever made, shoeless and dripping a trail of steam from his coat, and reeking of burnt plastic, but he would take it.  
He searched his pockets. Apparently the sword letter opener had been lost, either in the office, or in escaping from the car.

Sherlock found a semi-surreptitious set of stairs to sit on while he waited for the furore at Mackler Securities to die down, and then he went back that night.

Going through the office with more time on his hands, Sherlock planned to see which exact desk was the demon's, since he had seen the demon typing and his height and so forth. It was easy enough to discard some of the desks based on the angle of the keyboard and mouse. He put all the computer screens in his mind palace and sorted through them. That one was very smeared with fingerprints, either someone with floaters in their eyes, or an abuser of stimulants who constantly saw delusory specks of dust. Unimportant.

Sherlock knocked into something as he walked, concentrating on the computers. He heard the small thing hit the floor, and when he bent down, he found an elongated drip of the gold drool which had solidified. He tucked it in his pocket for later. There was only the one seam of it hanging down from the ceiling, but it was strange that the building wasn't blocked off and that no one was in it cleaning up the gold drops.

He heard a light thump behind him, and turned around. The area behind him was fairly open, and the location where the sound seemed to have come from had nothing visible. He moved off at an angle to try to triangulate the sound, and the thump came again. Sherlock looked up, as the sound seemed to have come from the drop ceiling. As he watched, a panel of the ceiling lifted up and dropped back, and the neighbouring panels lifted and dropped likewise, in a wave spreading out from the original panel. This seemed like a display meant to distract, so Sherlock concentrated on looking for the blue glow that showed him lies.

Sherlock scanned the room, turning quietly, but it was immediately obvious that there was a localised blue glow back in the direction he had originally been travelling. He approached it, looking for good weapons lying on desks as he passed them. The best he could find quickly was a staple remover.

The blue glow grew larger, taking up about half Sherlock's field of view, and then he was able to pick out a dark, human-shaped figure in the midst of it. The man whom he had fought earlier had apparently sat waiting for him to return. His skin was unmarred by all the gold drool, but his suit was in ruins.  
Mackler's shirt had black-ringed blobs of gold still sticking to it, and black rings with empty middles, where the metallic blobs had burned away too much of the shirt to support their weight, and they fell out of the shirt. The lower half of the trousers were singed entirely black.

Sherlock stopped focussing on the blue glow, and concentrated on what he could see in real life, for a given value of 'real'.  
Even though the unlit office was now much darker, only lit by the sodium lights outside, the molten gold was much easier to see in the dark. It spread across the floor, still glowing from the heat within. The sprinklers were the sort that are always full of water, not the air-filled ones. But all the heat detecting capsules had been blown, so the smoke didn't set off the sprinklers again. 

"I'm a patient man, but that seems a long time to wait."

"If that seems long, you must not have seen much of the underworld."

"I already know enough about every 'world'."

"Even I, knowing what I know, can see that's untrue."

"Well, I am a liar. We sociopaths generally are."

"Is that what you call it? It must mean something different in London."

Mackler retreated back into a windowless room. It was a conference room that had apparently been droneproofed to keep corporate spies away. Sherlock concentrated again on his more metaphysical truth-detecting abilities, besides his expert-level listening skills and senses of proprioception and touch. There was a clear blue glow in the room, but the blue didn't reflect off of the walls like a normal light would. Sherlock felt his way around the edge of the conference room with one hand, as he walked around the large central table. 

At about shoulder-height, he felt a smooth patch of metal. Sherlock pulled off a panel which apparently covered the projector controls. The metal rectangle did have some sharp edges, but was not at all suited as a projectile. 

Sherlock didn't think he could dissumulate well enough in this situation to prevent Mackler from realising he could see him. Sherlock approached the blue glow, within leaping distance. Mackler grasped at Sherlock's legs, and Sherlock jumped back out of the way, swinging the panel. Mackler struck Sherlock's forearm, and the panel went clattering under the conference table. Sherlock jumped back as far as he could, and reassessed. He dug the staple remover out of his pocket, as he jumped backwards, and broke the two halves apart so that he had two pointy pieces. He threw one at Mackler, but missed his eyes entirely. It bounced away out of view.

Then they circled the table, Sherlock walking backwards, until Sherlock stepped on the staple remover piece. He pulled his foot up quickly and involuntarily looked down. Mackler tackled him, landing on top of his legs, and then Sherlock swung at his eyes with the other staple remover half, and Mackler grabbed his arm, in an iron grip. Sherlock twisted and pushed in every combination he knew, but he couldn't get free. Sherlock reached into his coat pocket, hoping some solution would present itself. He found the gold drop there. He wondered if it would have any effect at all, having its origin in Mackler himself, but here went nothing.

He stabbed Mackler in the eye with his own gold blood drop. It looked really strange in his lie-detecting vision. Instead of a burst of fire, it went from blue swirls in the air, to entirely dark, like a film of an explosion run backwards. It was the greatest outlier other than that repentant poisoner. Sherlock gathered himself up off the floor, tested his foot to see if he could walk on it, and headed towards the stairs, and on his way back to the airport.

It turned out it wasn't that hard to get on a plane at the airport with only one shoe. Apparently they were only concerned about keeping out excess shoes.

As they landed at LAX, the sky looked really strange. The middle of the sky was a dark gray brown, and down by the horizon, it was a Martian red. All around, the fire alarms in buildings were going off, and fire truck sirens went back and forth frequently. The smoke didn't bother Sherlock, but the smoke felt even thicker than Los Angeles' usual, past Bangkok's, even. It was rare to see Americans wearing dust masks or surgical masks on any occasion, but today they were wearing them.

The part of Los Angeles he traveled through back to his haunts looked undamaged, even with all the smoke stains adhering to the walls, fences, and street signs. As he got closer to the usual spot, he saw that the hillside, instead of being a light yellow wheat color, had been scorched into a fresh black. He took his bearings off the shopping mall and two nearby mountains just in case the impossible had happened and his mind's eye had failed him. It was definitely the spot where he had been residing.

The whole area was black and flattened-looking. The brush and low trees had burned along with the grass, leaving the sharpened black stakes of tree trunks pointing skyward. The usual fast food soda cups and crisp bags were gone. There was a distorted shopping cart, and the metal remains of a chair, but everything else had burned away.

As Sherlock paced through the site, he saw something that was not sticks and not metal. They were human remains. The remains were still articulated, but the skin was generally burned away. No large animals had returned to disturb them. 

Sherlock evaluated the skeleton. The lack of skin was no great impediment to interpreting the facial skeleton. The lower facial prognathism was like that of...Rebecca?...The frontal bossing of the forehead was like hers, as were the somewhat rectangular eye orbits. The cranial capacity and the gracility of the skull also suggested a female. In short, he was sure it was she.

He had supposed she would always be there. And she wasn't even murdered. There was no one to chase down and catch for having done it. The only guilty party was time.

Sherlock had been sitting quite some time. At least, it was now dark, and he had arrived at the site in daylight. A dented and rusty white van pulled up, someone shoved an old toilet out of it, and the van peeled away. The toilet knocked down the hill until it landed directly on a rock and a shard flew out and hit him. Sherlock sat in the dusty cloverleaf and examined a white piece of porcelain near his right foot. Well, this sitting was getting him nowhere. 

He stood. He fished in the pocket of his coat for the bottle of isopropyl alcohol. Turning his coat sleeves inside-out, he used the wash bottle to distribute alcohol onto the armpit area of both sides to make sure he smelled as socially acceptable as possible, in case anyone could smell anything over the smoke. He still couldn't figure out why people would use Febreze when it cost so much more than plain alcohol and had a horrible artificial fragrance to boot. Lack of chemistry knowledge, apparently. Then he phoned the police.

After about ten minutes, a police car arrived with its lights on and pulled onto the bare, black ground of the median. The officer sat in the car for a few minutes before getting out. He approached Sherlock.

"Are you the one who called this in?"

"Yes, that's me."

"What's your name?"

"Robert Johnson."

The officer muttered something into his radio, and then looked him up and down. "You a Californian?"

"No, a Londoner."

"Address?"

"Two twenty...four Baker Street, W1."

"Is that like the zip code?"

"What's a zip code?"

It was always difficult to draw a line between what the average idiot would know, and Sherlock took a few minutes to give the impression he was only a passerby, of average intelligence. He was always almost surprised by how Americans thought someone with a British accent must be intelligent, even when he was clearly portraying a vapid businessman tourist. 

Anyway, in the end it accomplished what he wanted, and the corpse was taken away to the medical examiner's to begin a process that would end in the unclaimed remains being dumped into a mass grave with other indigent persons. It was what she would have wanted.

**Author's Note:**

> I would greatly appreciate if you would leave a criticism of this story. "You suck," is certainly a criticism, but I fervently hope you might leave something more specific, such as, "In such-and-such scene, I can't tell what sort of a room the characters are in, or how they're standing in relation to one another." Or, "Such-and-such detail is excessive, and contributes nothing to the story." Thanks again for reading!


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